


carry your dreams in your mouth

by Anonymous



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Canon Compliant, Gen, Woefully Little About Soulmates Despite It Being A Tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 16:47:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15465765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Try as they might, CyberLife had never been able to imbue their androids with colour. All the shades of monochrome that belonged to man when he came into the world, yes, but the splashes of red, purples, lilacs that bloomed throughout a lifetime- their absence was a reminder that for all their professed edification, men were not yet God, and could not claim to be.





	carry your dreams in your mouth

**Author's Note:**

> The basic premise:  
> You know those soulmate AUs where people start seeing in colour once they meet their 'soulmate'. This is that, but not quite.

There is an early 2020s film about a girl who receives an eye transplant and begins seeing in her donor's colours. While the film itself is regarded as patently awful and has become a staple at car boot sales and charity shops, the idea behind it gains enough traction that a scientific paper has to publish an article condemning the concept a month after its cinematic release. No eye transplant in history has given the recipient their donor's colours.

This small fact does not stop CyberLife from trying. It made front pages when they transplanted a pair of eyes into an android, eyes from a donor who had been able to see an estimated 1,000,000 shades of colour.

Indeed, CyberLife has tried on eight separate occasions to replicate the phenomenon of colour in their androids. The transplant followed a series of failed endeavours including the implementation of cone cells; cornea grafting; lab-grown optic nerves. Everything failed.

CyberLife's conclusion in 2028 is simple, the same as it has been for all of time: _what should have worked does not_. Seeing in colour is a phenomenon that simply cannot be artificially fabricated.

They keep trying.

\---

The seventeenth test performed on a new model is still a colour test. It's an assessment that's been conducted since Elijah Kamski first completed the prototype eventually to be known as 'Chloe', and still done as a matter of tradition.

So when RK800 #313 248 317 1 opens his eyes in the white confines of an underground lab, and after they tell him to state his name and function, they run him through approximately 120 tests. Colour is the seventeenth, following complex motor function and vocal testing.

Pseudoisochromatic plates are used, testing 75 shades of colour. The RK800 fails to distinguish between any of the shades.

It is a matter of surprise to exactly nobody in the room, and the test is not considered a failure.

\---

This is what it means to be human: to live, to breathe, to be born seeing the world in gray, to obtain colours through a lifetime. Maybe that is all of human experience, encapsulated.

\---

A truth: CyberLife tries on eight separate occasions to replicate the phenomenon of colour in their androids. All fail.

A secret: there are two experiments that are never put to file. All details associated with them are long purged from CyberLife servers, any hard copies of data burned.

A researcher involved in one of the experiments says this on tape:

“So we took a random selection of household models, models who had seen prior use." A pause. "There were fifty involved in the test. We... put them through colour tests for seventy-five listed shades, the basic government recommendation for colour testing. One of the androids had developed the ability to see green. With further testing, we concluded that it saw approximately two thousand shades concentrated at #56ff1e.”

The tape is deleted a week after its creation in 2025, and no backup ever made before its deletion. The experiment might have been classed a failure, were it not so thoroughly erased it no longer exists.

CyberLife creates their androids with the intent to be lifelike from conception. To be lifelike is to possess all mimicry of humanity, without possessing the essence of humanity. There is a fine line between the lifelike and the human, and it is a line CyberLife is careful to tread lightly.

To possess colour from conception is to have cheated god, is to have achieved the ideal of being lifelike. To obtain colour through experience is to be human.

By 2026, precautions have been programmed into every released model: vocabulary regarding colour is made highly selective, certain subroutines are hard-coded into models to make verbal identification of colour impossible.

There is no biochemical difference between the eyes of a human with colour and the eyes of a human without. There is no way to detect what colours a human possesses, except through physical testing. 

Theoretically, conducting a colour test on an android has been rendered impossible.

Theoretically, nothing changes.

\---

(Twenty years later, after everything is said and done and the researcher who once spoke on tape has published a book, someone asks: _what happened to the android?_ _The one who saw green._

The answer would be: they verified the results, and then the android was reset. They tested again. The results were still conclusive, a collection of about 2,000 shades concentrated at #56ff1e. They did a factory reset. The results changed; the colour had faded. But erased data would leave imprints, and CyberLife did not take chances.

The answer would be: at the end of the experiment, they took the android and disassembled it.)

( _Please don't_ , it said.)

\---

If a trail of footprints lead to the sea, their destination will vanish into water.

If the sea washes away those footprints, did they ever exist?

\---

The RK800 watches thirium spill between the deviant's shoulder blades. The alleyway is dark, no sound except that of water dripping on a roof, no life except for the false heartbeat of a thirium pump. He lowers his handgun and the simulation shatters around him.

\---

Rewind. The RK800 watches thirium spill between the deviant's shoulder blades.

Rewind. He watches the deviant fall, thirium splattering on the filthy, mudstained ground.

Rewind. Skin pulls away, reveals the pale white flesh of plastic and metal, highlights every stain like ugly smears of blood.

Rewind. The RK800 watches thirium spill between the deviant's shoulder blades, as if in a dream, as if superimposed.

He blinks (the image fades). He pulls the trigger.

\---

"Are we doing something wrong?"

"Dunno. He's not responding as he should- as it should. Maybe we can tweak the risk and reward values? It keeps on freezing up."

"Maybe it's because, I don't know, he's run through the same scenario twenty fucking times now."

"Well _maybe_ that's why we're running the same scenario, so we can test out bugs like this before he gets out into the real world."

"At least it took the shot."

"Yeah. Seven point three seven seconds late."

"Right, fine."

\---

(He thinks: is thirium meant to look like that?)

\---

It takes two days of RK800 not performing at optimal functioning before they remove the objective lock, give it more freedom to prioritize among different orders. Give it the ability to act with full autonomy in order to complete its objective.

(they might remove the embedded block that commands it to preserve human life, somewhere.)

(and there might be a law being broken, somewhere. but when you have enough money, eventually that kind of thing stops mattering.)

Someone says. “Maybe we need to give it more emotional range too. It needs to be able to act with more empathy. It's meant to act as a negotiator, not just a hitman.”

In the end, they remove so many programmed blocks- blocks that have been fundamental to androids as long as CyberLife has existed- that they need to program in something else.

The woman who figures out the answer first writes it thus on a piece of paper, on a table in a coffee shop with a mint frappe growing warm next to her:

> if mission = mission success
> 
>     val stress = decrease
> 
> else
> 
>     val stress = increase

“Operant conditioning,” she tells her project manager, after her lunch break is over. The solution it represents is almost maddeningly simple. They design and program in a reward module that affects every routine and subroutine in the RK800's functioning.

The project manager tells Jason Graff, who says: “This is thinning the line between deviant and deviant hunter.” He then says. “Fine. If it gets results, do what you want.”

It is a new outlook on the RK800 model, one that strengthens with every successful simulation and test.

RK800 will be loyal to CyberLife not because it is programmed to, but because it is programmed to _want_ to.

\---

It works.

(Of course it works.)

\---

He emerges onto the rooftop and the sky is opening above him, every life he has lived is catching in his throat. The sky is the same shade as the thirium on his hands, as the band of colour on his arm. The sky is breaking open like the inside of an egg, fracturing into shards of light around him. Returning him to a white room with white windows and white light.

Amanda is smiling.

"You've done well, Connor."

 ---

(Blue will always be the first colour Connor manifests.)

\---

It's funny, they wrote a film about this in the early 80s. A story a little like this one. Except the androids had different names, their version of the future was the neo-noir of popular novels at the time.

But there are no stories like that any more.

\---

(In 2026, an Academy Award film director wants to make a film about wisteria blooms and a cafe on the side of a quiet street.

He wants to pitch a romance about a girl with a cherry red smile and a man with a blue LED ring on his forehead. He thinks there will be rainy days, mismatched socks, ham and cheese croissants and a hopeful ending because his three past works have been tragedies and he thinks his audience would appreciate something hopeful. He gets the idea past eight friends, two of whom are screenwriters. He does not get past his pitch.

By 2028, avoiding the sentience issue is industry wisdom.)

\---

RK800 #313 248 317 51 looks out of the window and to the gray sky, the clouds that cover the sun. He imagines, somehow, that the sky had been different, in previous simulations. In previous versions of himself. He cannot quite tell how.

He does not spare it another thought.

Before the android leaves, an engineer comes up to him.

"Hey." The engineer says. "Good luck, out there."

The RK800 thinks the logical response might be: _luck has no bearing on the outcome of an event_. But he is not programmed for that. His mouth tugs into a smile that does not quite reach his eyes, and he says thank you instead.

\---

See, people obtain their colours in different ways. And the first time RK800 fails a sim, thirium bleeding like blood from its shoulder, one of the engineers looks into the simulation room and stops for a moment. The engineer thinks: _well, shit_.

He rolls a coin between his knuckles all afternoon, a habit since university. At the end of the day, the engineer goes home and feeds his fish and wonders if he's just being irrational or stupid. Or both.

So the thing is: some people still believe in it, the idea of  _sjælefrænde_. Like his grandmother, whose world had been black and white until she met a boy beneath an oak tree one morning in Spring and everything had blossomed into greens and blues and purples and browns, the whole world remade around her.

He ends up calling his grandmother, who talks about sending him chocolate and soup and asks if he's feeding himself properly.

He promises to visit.

So, _the thing is_ , he knows he has friends who've never gotten their colours from other people- ' _crimson for a sunset, one night in Italy; violet for a field of flowers in the countryside; turquoise for the sea when I was a child and walked places I wasn't supposed to go_ ' his best friend once said- but he's always gotten his colours from people. From people who would be important to him- from people he _knew_ would be important, because they left their colours on him.

A bit like how he'd known his best friend would be his best friend from their third meeting and he'd realized her scarf was an ugly, clashing purple and green (she still wears it every Autumn, ten years later). A bit like how he's had green ever since he can remember, for his father's eyes, for his mother's plants.

And maybe you know where this is leading.

So it's not quite _soulmates_ , not like his grandmother and grandfather, but when the engineer goes in to work the next day and programs in an additional 300 languages for Connor, he thinks about AI and sentience and consciousness while he's doing it. He wonders what the android is supposed to mean to him.

He wonders if the android got anything from him.

(he knows it would be better if nobody ever checked.)

When the RK800 starts getting certain calibration issues at iteration #40- they've never had a model with such advanced capabilities before- he idly touches the disk of metal in his pocket and says: "Maybe a coin might help with the movement and calibration issues."

And when the RK800 (#51, now, and he wonders if that changes anything, if they're different people or just the same-) leaves the facility, the engineer goes up to him for the first time. Fights the urge to do something stupid like shake the android's hand, or pat him on the shoulder, or say something awful like 'have a good life' or 'well I guess the world's your oyster'. He says hello instead, and good luck, and goodbye.

And then he goes home, and feeds his fish, and goes to bed. The next morning he flips a coin, doesn't look at where it lands before he calls into work and says he's quitting.

They make him come into the office to sign eleven NDAs.

Weeks later, on a taxi to the Detroit airport, he rolls the same coin between his knuckles and watches the sky bleed from blue to sunset gray. He thinks he might stay at his grandmother's house for awhile. Wait for Winter to come and go, and then find a job somewhere in his hometown.

( _"You don't ever think they're alive?" His best friend asks, the day before he gets on the plane and leaves for America._

_He shrugs. "They're programmed to emulate life.That doesn't make them alive."_

_She hums. "For me, there's no difference."_ )

He thinks he's grown tired of working on androids.

(He thinks maybe his best friend was right.)

\---

(By the time RK800 first leaves the CyberLife facility, there are two other people he's left with a colour they did not previously own.

By the time the revolution is done, Connor won't know how many people he's left his blue on. And in truth, he will think nothing of it.)

\---

The RK800 drops the dwarf gourami back in its aquarium, watches it swim away. Lingers, perhaps, for a moment longer than necessary. The scales of the fish glimmer in the light, its tail beating water, and there is

a shift.

A shift at the edge of his programming, not quite tangible, not quite definable. Something is here that was not a moment ago. Something is more than it was before.

He conducts a cursory self-scan, but if it is a glitch then it is not recognized by his programming. If it is a glitch, then it is inconsequential, and has no bearing on the mission.

He turns away from the aquarium and moves on.

**Author's Note:**

> There will probably(?) be 8 chapters (everyone I've listed in the character tag gets a chapter, and then there's a repeat of Connor), but heck I'm on this train and it already looks like it's gonna be a wreck off a cliff.
> 
> Leave me a kudos! :D


End file.
